Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
About 10 million people start a business each year, and about one out of two will make it. The average entrepreneur is often on his or her third startup.
Silicon Valley has been developing as a startup community for over 60-70 years. This notion that you can create something in two or five years is foolish.
Separation, I think, in an early-stage company or a startup environment is not a good thing. You need to basically live and breathe the entire environment.
The right algorithm is to put off seeking funds for as long as physically possible. And in an ideal world, a startup would never have to seek funds at all.
For a startup, you need to stay small so the others don't attack, or you aim to be one of the big guys. If you don't do it right, you might lose everything.
VCs like acquisitions as much as IPOs because the acquiring companies often can rationalize paying large multiples over the current valuation of the startup.
Ten Internets ago, when PayPal was started, it was all these tools that no one had built yet to bring commerce to the Internet. My first startup used PayPal.
Key is the question of where do new ideas come from. Historically, four places: government labs, big corporations, startup companies, and research universities.
The answers to all a startup's challenges are out there. By setting up the right mechanisms for gathering feedback, the road to success can be a less bumpy ride.
The life of a startup is full of ups and downs, an emotional roller coaster ride that you can't quite imagine if you've spent your whole career in a corporation.
One of the core values of the startup world is that you must have a list of core values. Like all abstract ideas, they're easy to dream up and tricky to implement.
It's rare for a startup to make money immediately, so you need to make sure that you have enough saved or that you have another income stream that can support you.
Working on a startup is a balancing act: being crazy enough to believe your idea can take off but not crazy enough to miss the signs when it's clearly not going to.
By maintaining an active feedback system at every stage of a startup, founders can reduce their burn rate, increase their virality coefficient, and retain key hires.
There is never a time in a company's history when cost control can be relegated to the back burner, but for a startup company, keeping costs low is a vital necessity.
Convince the investor that you guys are moving fast and that this isn't some long slog... you're thinking about it like a startup where you can move fast and make mistakes.
When Facebook first started, and it was just a social directory for undergrads at Harvard, it would have seemed like such a bad startup idea, like some student side project.
We provide business advice and guidance. We started it here in India first, and now we have taken it globally. India was the first for startup incubation in the world for us.
I wish I had known the value of interning at a startup before starting my own. There is so much I could have learned on somebody else's dime in a much lower-risk environment.
Hold at least one all-hands meeting every quarter and, to underscore the startup's team concept, make sure at least one additional executive joins you in leading the meeting.
As a serial entrepreneur, angel investor and public company CEO, nothing irks me more than when a startup founder talks about wanting to cash in with an initial public offering.
Every startup should address a real and demonstrated need in the world - if you build a solution to a problem lots of people have, it's so easy to sell your product to the world.
I love technology. I have my iPad, iPad mini, iPhone and Mac laptop. Because I love technology, I think if I were not at the NBA, I would try to be part of a tech startup company.
I was one of the early folks at eBay, and by 1999, it was completely overrun by consultants from McKinsey, Bain, and BCG. It went from being a cool, fun startup to an MBA factory.
Big companies are often in the process of laying off workers. Small startup companies are the ones that are hiring. The statistics prove that's where job growth is going to occur.
Co-innovation between a startup and an enterprise works best when each party fills a gap in the other's capabilities and when they share equitably in both the work and the rewards.
The best founders are extremely thoughtful and have an eye for quality. I don't know if there's any generic advice here that would be helpful. Startup knowledge is a moving target.
You can work hard and be smart, but you need to think about when you're going to be part of a startup and build it. You only have so much energy, whether you want to admit it or not.
The reality is the Lean Startup method is not about cost, it is about speed. Lean startups waste less money, because they use a disciplined approach to testing new products and ideas.
It took less time to build 'Instagram' than it did for me to get my work visa. The app was an instant hit, and Facebook agreed to acquire the startup for about $1 billion in April 2012.
I think my approach to a creative career was very entrepreneurial. Even though I'm a writer, I've always viewed my work much in the same way as a startup or marketer might view their work.
If you don't share information among your startup's team, then it'll be just about a coincidence if product, marketing, and engineering are ever aligned. Those odds are too low to succeed.
There's a reason why Silicon Valley is the worldwide innovation center, or why this is the startup valley, because I truly believe startup companies like mine are pushing the economy forward.
Halcyon people have put aside and left their homes, their million dollar salaries, full professorships at major universities, and fully seed-funded startup companies to be part of this effort.
Decades before we were able to articulate the value of 'getting out of the building' and the Lean Startup, the value in having skunk works controlling their own distribution was starkly evident.
Startup stories are always smoother in the telling than they are in reality. A startup is not one, but a series of 'Aha!' moments, and some which seem like 'Aha!' moments but turn out not to be.
At a startup, it's hard enough to get a single thing right, much less a whole bunch of things. Especially if the things you are trying to do are not only dissimilar but actively impede each other.
One of the things that's so interesting when talking to minority founders specifically is that there is really a knowledge gap in understanding what the risk-reward profile is for doing a startup.
A lot of my energy is going to Code for America, Jen Pahlka's non-profit startup. We're doing a lot of great work teaching government how to apply technology and changing the culture of government.
Part of the magic of a startup is the fear of death. You have only so much money in the bank, and if you don't get to the right milestone before you run out, then the company goes under - it's over.
There is a great deal of innovation occurring in Colorado, with some of the most brilliant minds and creative startup companies in the world formulating climate-change solutions right in our backyard.
The first thing that any city that's trying to create a startup community or an entrepreneurial ecosystem that's vibrant should do is get rid of the idea that they're trying to be like Silicon Valley.
I am a partner at CrunchFund, a venture capital firm with investments in many startups around the world. I am also a limited partner in many other venture funds which have their own startup investments.
The gender disparity in STEM is depriving our country of talented minds that could be inventing the next breakthrough technology, founding the next big startup or keeping our nation safe from cyberattacks.
If your startup is only in the development or idea stage, there is almost no better predictor of failure - I mean, utter failure, scorched-earth bankruptcy - than raising too much money in the first round.
SpaceX is very unusual. I don't know of any other startup where the founder put in $100 million of his own money before looking for any outside capital. They have wildly exceeded any reasonable expectations.
Every weekend I would take a train to Delhi and sneak into startup events. I really enjoyed meeting entrepreneurs who were solving big problems. They were way smarter than me. I knew this is where I had to be.
Never expect that your startup can cover every aspect of the market. The key is knowing what segment will respond to your unique offering. Who your product appeals to is just as important as the product itself.
Entrepreneurship transparency, I think, is important because there are so many problems that you just have to be real about them. There are so many ways for a startup to die, so the transparency attitude is key.
Aspiring entrepreneurs are often advised to work at a startup for a couple of years first, to understand what's involved. But often, each company's approach to success is very narrow. So my advice is, 'Just do it.'